Amit Singh passed on a note about an event happening in September, a gathering of PHPers around Pune, India - PHPCamp.

PHPCamp is a 'ad-hoc gathering' for PHP community. It similar to barcamp, but more focused towards PHP based web application development. This means that anyone can come to PHPCamp and participate.

Right now the details are pretty tentative, but the even is scheduled to happen on September 20th and will last all day. They're still looking for a venue but you can go ahead and add your name to their list of campers if you'd like to attend.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Andreas Uhsemann has posted about a project that he and fellow Mayflower Barcampers came up with that they thought could be useful (and interesting) to work on - a PHP extension to interface with the Skype communication tool.

At the Mayflower Barcamp a few weeks ago we had a very interesting and promising project: Develop a PHP extension for communication with Skype. Actually this project was a merge between two projects: One was to "develop a PHP extension" - five out of six project members never had written any PHP extension or did any PHP core development before. The other project was the Skype extension, with the goal to have a new PHP function that could send a chat message to a given Skype profile.

As they worked on it, they realized that it was really D-Bus (the message bus system) they needed to interface with, not Skype directly. They include some of the code they used to make the connection - creating the message, setting a few parameters and "send and block" the message out to the D-Bus connection waiting. They've even put the code up on a public CVS repository (on thinkforge.org) if you'd like to download and play with it yourself.